My Mother Is A Fish

[Courtesy William Faulkner]
It's because we alone in the United States (I'm not speaking of Sambo
right now; I'll get to him in a minute) are a homogeneous people. I
mean the only one of any size. The New Englander is too of course
back inland from the coastal spew of Europe which this country
quarantined unrootable into the rootless ephemeral cities with factory
and foundry and municipal paychecks as tight and close and police could
have done it, but there are no longer enough of him just as there are
not of the Swiss who are not a people so much as a neat clean small
quite solvent business. So we are not really resisting what the
outland calls (and we too) progress and enlightenment. We are
defending not actually our politics or beliefs or even our way of life,
but simply our homogeneity from a federal government to which in simple
desperation the rest of this country has had to surrender voluntarily
more and more of it s personal and private liberty in order to continue
to afford the United States. And of course we will continue to defend
d it. We [...] dont know why it is valuable. We dont need to know. Only a
few of us know that only from homogeneity comes anything of a people
or for a people of durable and lasting value--the literature, the art,
the science, that minimum of government and police which is the
meaning of freedom and liberty, and perhaps most valuable of all a
national character worth anything in a crisis--that crisis we shall
face someday when we meet an enemy with as many men as we have and as much material as we have and--who knows?--who can even brag and boast
as we brag and boast.

That's why we must resist the North: not just to preserve ourselves
nor even the two of us as one to remain one nation because that will
be the inescapable byproduct of what we will preserve: which is the
very thing that three generations ago we lost a bloody war in our own
back yards so that it remain intact: the postulate that Sambo is a
human being living in a free country and hence must be free. That's
what we are really defending: the privilege of setting him free
ourselves: which we will have to do for the reason that nobody else
can since going on a century ago now the North tried it and have been
admitting for seventy-five years now that they failed. So it will have
to be us. Soon now this sort of thing wont even threaten anymore. It
shouldn't now. It should never have. Yet it did last Saturday and it
probably will again, perhaps once more, perhaps twice more. But then
no more, it will be finished;l the shame will still be there of course
but then the whole chronicle of man's immortality is in the suffering
he has endured, his struggle toward the tars in the stepping-stones of
his expiations. Someday Lucas Beauchamp can shoot a white man in the
back with the same impunity to lynch-rope or gasoline as a white man;
in time he will vote anywhen and anywhere a white man can and send
his children to the same school anywhere the white man's children go
and travel anywhere the white man travels as the white man does it. But
it wont be next Tuesday. Yet people in the North believe it can be
compelled even into next Monday by the simple ratification by votes of
a printed paragraph: who have forgotten that although a long
quarter-century ago Lucas Beauchamp's freedom was made an article in
our constitution and Lucas Beauchamp's master was not merely beaten to
his knees but trampled for ten years on his face in the dust to make
him swallow it, yet only three short generations later they are faced
once more with the necessity of passing legislation to set Lucas
Beauchamp free.

And as for Lucas Beauchamp, Sambo, he's a homogeneous man too, except
that part of him which is trying to escape not even into the best of
the white race but into the second best-the cheap shoddy dishonest
music, the cheap flash baseless overvalued money, the glittering
edifice of publicity foundationed on nothing like a cardhouse over an
abyss and all the noisy muddle of political activity which used to be
our minor national industry and is now our national amateur
pastime--all the spurious uproar produced by men deliberately
fostering and then getting rich on our national passion for the
mediocre:who will even accept the best provided it is debased and
befouled before being fed to us: who are the only people on earth who
rag publicly of being second-rte, i.e., lowbrows. I dont mean that
Sambo. I mean the rest of him who has a better homogeneity than we
have and proved it by finding himself roots into the land where he had
actually to displace white men to put them down: because he had
patience even when he didn't have hope, the long view even when there
was nothing to see at the end of it, not even just the will but the
desire to endure because he loved the old few simple things which no one
wanted to take from him: not an automobile nor flash clothes nor his
picture in the paper but a little of music (his own), a hearth, not
his child but an child, a God a heaven which a man may avail himself a
little of at any time without having to wait to die, a little earth
for his own sweat to fall on among his own green shoots and plants.
We--he and us--should confederate: swap him the rest of the economic
and political and cultural privileges which are his right, for the
reversion of his capacity to wait and endure and survive. Then we would
prevail; together we would dominate the United States; we would
present a front not only impregnable but not even to be threatened by
a mass of people who no longer have anything in common save a frantic
greed for money and a basic feat of a failure of national character
which thy hide from one another behind a loud lipservice to a flag.